News Alert: Religious Liberty is in the U.S. Constitution

Many of the folks experiencing an awakening about the importance of the United States Constitution are forgetting one very important fact: The First Amendment protects our right of religious liberty – and the First Amendment is in the Constitution.

Those who champion the U.S. Constitution seem to think that they can also champion liberal social causes. Unfortunately for them, the Framers included the protection of our God-given right of conscience when it comes to legitimate religious beliefs. Some people might want to make environmentalism, the right to abort an unborn life, or perverse sexual orientations into a religion, but that effort fails any reasonable test.

Evidently our Founding Fathers didn’t think the social issues were unimportant.

Glenn Beck this past week said on this radio show that the rise of the tea party “isn’t just about taxes.” To the question, “Do social issues matter?” popular conservative writer Jonah Goldberg answered “hell yes.” Goldberg writes:

Here’s the funny thing. The notion that there are ‘social conservatives’ over here and ‘economic conservatives’ over there is wildly overstated by many political commentators. Some of that overstatement is deliberate. Some partisans on both sides of the political aisle seem keen on writing off social conservatives in favor of some new constituency usually to be named later.

If you look around the American political landscape it’s just hard to find a lot of socially liberal, fiscally conservative types. It turns out that being socially liberal is a pretty good-though hardly perfect-indicator of fiscal profligacy. Meanwhile, the more pro-life you are, the more likely you are to be a free-market, low-tax conservative. The more pro-choice you are, the more likely it is that you will be liberal across all categories. This is obviously untrue in some individuals, but as a general trend it seems undeniable.

Goldberg also notes that “it’s pretty doubtful that the GOP could survive by abandoning social issues”:

Rather, I think that Arthur Brooks’ formulation gets at the heart of the matter: The sudden, massive, growth in the federal government has itself become a social issue. Economic concerns have sparked the age-old question driving social conservatives ‘What kind of country will we be?’ But that hardly means social conservatism doesn’t matter anymore.

Even Newt Gingrich has been using the line “secular and socialist machine” to describe the onslaught of Obama’s Democratic Party.

We are a nation that values hard work, entrepreneurship, innovation, and merit-based upward mobility. These values have allowed our nation to rise from colonial subjects of the British Empire to the world’s top economic and military power.

But the values that have made America great are threatened by a secular socialist machine that wants to transform America into a radically different nation. The secular socialist machine wants our nation to be dominated by unions, controlled by bureaucracy, and to become a place where the government engineers a vast redistribution of wealth to favored groups.

Note his use of the word “values.” Sorry – all of you who would like to see social standards of behavior dropped – no civilization can pretend you have one kind of nation and another kind of people inhabiting that nation.

This website has posted and linked articles explaining in more detail the inseparable connection between the economic and social issues – they can be found here.

Here are some additional recommended readings:

The Manhattan Declaration

The Mount Vernon Statement

The 2008 Republican Party National Platform

Note too in the “Contract From America” this:

Individual Liberty

Our moral, political, and economic liberties are inherent, not granted by our government. It is essential to the practice of these liberties that we be free from restriction over our peaceful political expression and free from excessive control over our economic choices.

And number one in their list of ten contract provisions is protection of the U.S. Constitution. The document says nothing about ignoring the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.